Egypt (La Mort de Philae) eBook

It is the entrance to El-Azhar, a venerable place
in Islam, whence have issued for nearly a thousand
years the generations of priests and doctors charged
with the propagation of the word of the Prophet amongst
the nations, from the Mohreb to the Arabian Sea, passing
through the great deserts. About the end of our
tenth century the glorious Fatimee Caliphs built this
immense assemblage of arches and columns, which became
the seat of the most renowned Moslem university in
the world. And since then successive sovereigns
of Egypt have vied with one another in perfecting
and enlarging it, adding new halls, new galleries,
new minarets, till they have made of El-Azhar almost
a town within a town.

*****

“He who seeks
instruction is more loved of God than he who fights
in a holy war.”
—­A verse
from the Hadith.

Eleven o’clock on a day of burning sunshine
and dazzling light. El-Azhar still vibrates with
the murmur of many voices, although the lessons of
the morning are nearly finished.

Once past the threshold of the double ornamented door
we enter the courtyard, at this moment empty as the
desert and dazzling with sunshine. Beyond, quite
open, the mosque spreads out its endless arcades,
which are continued and repeated till they are lost
in the gloom of the far interior, and in this dim
place, with its perplexing depths, innumerable people
in turbans, sitting in a close crowd, are singing,
or rather chanting, in a low voice, and marking time
as it were to their declamation by a slight rhythmic
swaying from the hips. They are the ten thousand
students come from all parts of the world to absorb
the changeless doctrine of El-Azhar.

At the first view it is difficult to distinguish them,
for they are far down in the shadow, and out here
we are almost blinded by the sun. In little attentive
groups of from ten to twenty, seated on mats around
a grave professor, they docilely repeat their lessons,
which in the course of centuries have grown old without
changing like Islam itself. And we wonder how
those in the circles down there, in the aisles at the
bottom where the daylight scarcely penetrates, can
see to read the old difficult writings in the pages
of their books.

In any case, let us not trouble them—­as
so many tourists nowadays do not hesitate to do; we
will enter a little later, when the studies of the
morning are over.

This court, upon which the sun of the forenoon now
pours its white fire, is an enclosure severely and
magnificently Arab; it has isolated us suddenly from
time and things; it must lend to the Moslem prayer
what formerly our Gothic churches lent to the Christian.
It is vast as a tournament list; confined on one side
by the mosque itself, and on the others by a high
wall which effectively separates it from the outer
world. The walls are of a reddish hue, burnt by
centuries of sun into the colour of raw sienna or
of bloodstone. At the bottom they are straight,